Colin Sheridan: Guardiola speaking up on Palestine reminded people silence is not neutrality — it is a choice

The criticism of Pep Guardiola expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people is often dressed up as sophistication but the truth is simpler: it's about the grotesque instinct to police compassion.

If we only allow solidarity from morally spotless people, we will have none at all. Pic: Nick Potts/PA Wire.

Last week Pep Guardiola did what public figures are routinely advised not to do: he spoke like a human being. In a football world that increasingly resembles a brand partnership with studs, he offered something rare - solidarity. Not a manifesto nor a party-political rallying cry. And certainly not a statement cooked up by lawyers. Just the plain idea that when people are being slaughtered, when children are dying in numbers so obscene they blur into abstraction, it is normal to feel horror and to say so.

And because this is modern football, Pep’s words were met with a predictable chorus of tutting. The snide and the smarmy. The faux-sensible. The ones who are never quite brave enough to say “I don’t care about those people”, but who will spend days angrily explaining why others shouldn’t say they do. It says far more about them than it does about Guardiola, a man who clearly understands football is a cultural language - a kind of civic religion - and that when you occupy its pulpit, you are part of the public square whether you like it or not.